Samsung admits and blames ad agency (astro-turfing company) for trying to bribe developers

Samsung blames ad agency for trying to bribe developers August 2, 2013

Samsung has admitted that developers were offered money to mention its developer competition on the popular developer community Stack Overflow. In a statement issued to The Verge, the company condemns the actions, noting that they were "clearly against Samsung Electronics corporate policy." The company claims it wasn't aware of the situation, and as soon as it found out that a PR firm was offering cash for content, it cancelled the plans. "We remain committed to engaging in transparent and honest communications with consumers."

"Our tactics were misguided, unethical, and wrong."

Shortly before we received Samsung's statement, James Yoo, the COO of Fllu, the PR firm at the center of the scandal, posted an apology to the developer that broke the story. In the frank message, Yoo notes that the tactics Fllu used were "misguided, unethical, and wrong." Yoo also admits that the statement it gave to The Verge, which claimed Samsung was not a client, "may have been misleading." He explains that Fllu was "working on Samsung's promotion for an agency that works for Samsung.

formatting link

Of course their tactics were wrong!!

They are the tactics of failed MBAs reaching out to industrial strength trolls who bleat and rant all day and all night wasting time, money and resources without making any product.

The only scary thing a failed MBA might do is employ a troll who made a product that sold and made money for his company.

Examples of it are littered in usenet (NOT!).

-----------------

Failed MBA's reaching out to trolls again to further their respective company without looking at the alternatives and / or discussing their needs with the open source community openly in active engagement.

Legitimate requests for example to develop open source boards of their latest chips and to open source their drivers all go unheeded as far as I know.

So it seems failed MBAs infiltrating Samsung have on the one hand ignore requests for open sourcing their technology for wider adoption and creating infrastructure and on the other hand the failed MBAs want respect in developer forums for closed source crap.

The two are mutually exclusive.

Samsung and many other companies, particular China factories and Taiwan factories need to sit down and think this thing through. The world's most powerful developer force is now only the open source movement. With zero paperwork and formal structures to hold them down, they are more agile than ANY proprietary force that wants to compete with it.

You can't bargain with them if you got no documentation or the will power to engage with the open source source world.

Those who refuse to enage the open source world, Linux and the open hardware movement are going dark (micorshaft for example, intel another one) and failing with lost sales while those who do, even if just a little bit, like for example Allwinner, they find they have immense success over their rivals, and take on the likes of Intel and win hands down.

Ignore the open source movement at your own peril.

Ignore Linux and GPL at your own expense.

If the failed MBAs in Samsung are removed and Samsung handed over a few documents containing everything about the Octa Exynos 5 ARM supercomputer for example, including the video hardware, the entire open source developer world will light up and their name would be up in lights as everyone rush to build Octa boards and kick start their sales of Octa chips creating endless demand.

That is a lot cheaper option of creating demand than employing failed MBAs and their failed trolling tactics.

Besides trolling is illegal and prison is not far away for the more extreme trolls:

formatting link

So if failed MBAs insist on trolls to make up for their own failings, then its time to call it a day on failed MBAs and bring in new realism into business by hiring those with experience of building bridges with open source and expand sales that way by sharing information.